Andrew McCabe – the top FBI official by fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions hours before his planned retirement – is now soliciting donations online for his legal defense fund.

. . . . Unfortunately, the need for a legal defense fund is a growing reality. Media reports indicate that at a minimum, there are a number of congressional inquiries that he will be required to respond to, as well as the broader Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigation that is ongoing, and any potential lawsuits he might consider.

Mr. McCabe’s legal team is being led by former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich at Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP.

Fired FBI Official Andrew McCabe Is Crowdfunding A Legal Defense Fund As He Says He "Might Consider" Lawsuits https://t.co/cF3DMeVoyO

As of this writing, McCabe has raised almost $400,000, far surpassing the stated goal of $250k. If he’s smart, he’ll use that money to lawyer up. McCabe is facing multiple legal probes.

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General has accused McCabe of misleading investigators and approving media leaks.

Thursday, AG Sessions announced that Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber was investigating DOJ and FBI abuse.

Making matters even worse for McCabe, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) claims McCabe lied to former FBI Director James Comey about media leaks. From the WaPo:

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in an interview that McCabe lied to Comey when Comey asked him how sensitive information ended up in an October 2016 Wall Street Journal story detailing internal tension at the FBI and Justice Department over an investigation into matters surrounding the Clinton Foundation. Jordan’s staffers, along with staffers for Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, were permitted this week to view a report on McCabe from the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, Jordan said.

Neither Meadows nor his spokesman returned requests for comment.

According to Jordan, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility determined that McCabe lied to his superiors and investigators four times: first, to Comey in October 2016; then, to FBI investigators in May; and later, to the Office of the Inspector General twice, beginning in the summer.

In a statement, McCabe’s lawyer said it was fully appropriate for the bureau’s deputy director to authorize media interaction, asserting that Comey knew about it. The lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said emails between the two men “clearly show that Mr. McCabe advised Director Comey that he was working with colleagues at the FBI to correct inaccuracies before the stories were published, and that they remained in contact through the weekend while the interactions with the reporter continued.”

“We deeply regret being compelled to respond to this selective leaking with any comment at all,” Bromwich said, accusing Republicans of “attempting to create a false narrative” that pits Comey and McCabe against each other.

Looking forward to reading those emails. I’m sure we’ll see them soon enough.

What a shame that this creature is so destitute that his net wealth of a reported $11 million won’t cover his potential legal fees. He must know he’s really in deep er, water.

As he didn’t complete a full 20 years as a GS 1811 (and even SESer’s don’t make that sort of cash), I wonder if he inherited his wealth* or if his ethical standards allowed for insider trading.

* Alternatively, his wife, the Doctor, might have inherited – he could be like John F Ken, er – Kerry and married his money. Most doctors don’t make enough to stash away that sort of coin at this couple’s presumed age and after Med school. I know, she packed his lunch every day.

Sarah Palin went out and earned 500k just to pay down her lawyer fees. She worked for nearly every penny. Fees incurred because she had the nerve to run on McCain’s ticket. McCain. She was nearly ruined and that cheap weasel McCain stiff-armed her.

Recall the following stuff:
THE NERVE OF THAT SNOWBILLY!!
HOW DARE SHE!
THAT PROVINCIAL IDIOT!

Recall Dave Letterman calling her daughter a whore? Literally called her a whore.

Meanwhile, democrats line up to dump cash into McCabe’s Slush Fund. The donks are saying “we got your back $$$” no matter what happens. Republicans kicked Palin on the way down and never let up. GoP hate her provincial guts.

I can see this weasel doing a Go Fund Me deal, but that is a lot of money for a wealthy person to get, and it can’t have been up that long. I think it should be that if this turd gets convicted that every single donor to his pay off should be outed.

The money that seem to flow to him just doesn’t really balance with his salary level… and this amount of money going to him just reeks of underhandedness going on.

I also hope he forgets that these funds are taxable, so he gets in trouble for that as well.

He needs to go into witness protection to save his family, I think he needs to flip and tell all.

I also want to see the names of the reporters he leaked to. Freedom of the press works in both directions – if they have a right to publish leaks from the government, we have a right to know who was being leaked.

Treason against the United States can only take two forms: 1) levying war against them; 2) adhering to their enemies combined with an overt act that gives them aid and comfort. Which of these two do you claim “running a covert disinformation campaign to overturn a legitimate national election” fits?

And where the hell is the mainstream media on this? I think we need to tighten restrictions on the 1st Amendment. We have a revolving door between deep State and the media, I’m not sure how deep the corruption goes but we certainly don’t have a free press anymore. Reporters are being fired because they stray from the narrative.

Isn’t one of the purposes of the First Amendment to prevent a state-controlled media?

Because that’s what we have.

Some guy, I forget who, made the critical point that all of the major stories in the last several years have been broken by stings (like O’Keeffe) leaks and hacks. And then covered with a pillow by the state media

Isn’t one of the purposes of the First Amendment to prevent a state-controlled media?

No. It doesn’t have a purpose.

And it’s got nothing to do with “media”. You’re buying into the reporting industry’s lie that it has a special place in the constitution, that the “press” part of “freedom of speech and of the press” somehow refers to it. It doesn’t, of course. There is no separate “freedom of the press”; “freedom of speech and of the press” is one phrase, protecting everybody’s right to say and publish whatever they like. Reporters have this right just like everybody else, but no more.

It’s pretty ironic too. The Democrats corrupted institutions of the State, including the FBI, to overturn the democratic election of a President …and then tell us we’re paranoid for wanting firearms to defend ourselves from the State.

Forget firearms, they tell us we’re paranoid for seeing any of this, when in their narrative the facts are just the opposite, and Trump’s election was in fact undemocratic because the voters knew too much — they should have had to vote in ignorance of the true information which Trump conspired with Putin to reveal to them. Or something.

I’m just loving Comey and McCabe throwing each other under the bus. They’re both a couple of pathological conniving liars. Undoubtedly Comey knew everything McCabe was up to, because McCabe’s nose was so far up Comey’s butt–that’s how he made his career at the FBI. McCabe was there to do Comey’s dirty work, in this case, leaking to the media to spin a story to make it more favorable to the FBI. Of course Comey’s going to deny he knew about it–it’s like Mission Impossible–“If you are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” LOL. This HAS to be good for Trump.

See my comments below. I think that McCabe is going to be the loser here. He was, essentially the head of the Deep State, the permanent bureaucracy, in the FBI, being the top ranked career employee in the agency. The cabal, the conspiracy, wasn’t meeting in Comey’s office – they were meeting in McCabe’s office. This is a classic situation where when you strike at the king, you had better kill him. He and his Deep State cabal did, and are going to pay the price of failure. Moreover, Comey, while never on Team Trump, did switch hit a bit, trying a bit to play Both sides of the road during the election. McCabe did not. He and his people were playing partisan politics at least from spring 2016 through summer 2017, well into the new Administration. Which Isabel a good part of why I think that McCabe is the designated fall guy, he knows it, and that is why he has the GoFundMe page set up (and why it is being funded).

As I noted, this is he says/he says, except that this sort of delegation should have been in writing. I don’t think that it was. Maybe there was a contemporaneous memo to self, but or some such. But McCabe doesn’t have access to his office computer (Neither does Comey). Any thing they find at home is suspect, because they shouldn’t have it. And a jury isn’t going to believe McCabe, after having been caught lying under oath

It’s very interesting that McCabe’s press statement about all this blamed Republicans for trying to destroy McCabe’s credibility, but “forgot” to mention that Comey was one of the people who basically called out McCabe as a liar and the I.G. decided to wid it. Of course McCabe also lied to the I.G. and apparently others. Let’s hope McCabe continues to try to save his pension and his skin by explicitly calling out Comey as the liar that he is. They both are. Two peas in a pod.

Reposting from a previous thread – what seems to maybe have gone on with McCabe is that he several times testified that he hadn’t authorized leaks – specifically to the WSJ. Turns out, we know who was leaking to the WSJ, and that was Peter Strzok, and we know that because of those text messages we have seen between him and Lisa Page. But when McCabe first testified that he hadn’t authorized the leaks, it is likely that IG Horowitz hadn’t yet known about the text messages. After he did know, then, well, McCabe’s story changed. Whoops. The critical inflection point here seems, again, to be July/August 2017, when Strzok and Page are reassigned – likely right after Horowitz informs Mueller about the text messages. I should add that McCabe was apparently trying to shift his story at precisely the time when lesser discrepancies were being used by Mueller to indict Gen Flynn. I think, at that point, the knives, in the FBI, with the rank and file, were out for him.

Sundance, over at CTH, has gone into some depth trying to tie dates together from multiple threads. He suspects that things started to unravel when OIG got their hands on the text messages. He theorizes that it was Page, documenting something, possibly that those leaks to the WSJ were authorized by McCabe. What he doesn’t say, but maybe should have, is that those leaks, if unauthorized, could have violated the Espionage Act – since they were still classified. Meaning that Strzok and Page faced felony charges if they couldn’t prove that they were authorized to leak.

Here is what may have happened. There were leaks throughout the summer and fall of 2016 from the DoJ and FBI that were designed to harm Trump. So, when he takes office, he tells his new AG to handle the problem. AG Sessions tells IG Horowitz the same. Starting at the top of the FBI, Comey said “I didn’t authorize the leaks”. So, next his #2 is asked the same question, with the same answer. At some point, the trail leads to Strzok and Page, who appear to be leakers – coincidentally, the ones who leaked to the WSJ. One of them, Sundance thinks Page, because she is the legal mind, figures out that if they can’t show that the leaking was authorized, then they are toast, having ostensibly disclosed classified information, thus violating the Espionage Act. Not good. Which is where their text messages come in – they appear to show higher level authorization for the leaking (to the WSJ). Excrement starts flowing back uphill. If they believed that they were authorized (and expected) to leak, their authorization came from McCabe. Who had previously testified, under oath “not me”. Whoops. Well, maybe his memory was a bit hazy there. But Mueller had just extorted a guilty plea from Gen Flynn for just that, a hazy memory. And Flynn didn’t have the advantage of being called out directly for his memory lapse by investigators.

It is going to be interesting. Either Comey or McCabe was lying about authorizing leaking. Logic tells me it was McCabe, just by Comey’s other actions during that time. Maybe McCabe will find a self serving memo lying around somewhere, but he no longer has access to his work computer, having been fired. Of course, neither does Comey. And any memos that they may have lying around elsewhere were illegally retained. Absent some evidence to corroborate his claim that Comey authorized him to leak, McCabe is the one who is most at criminal risk for the leaking.

Which is probably why he has gone this route to raise a legal defense fund. Big difference between the process crimes of lying to the FBI, and violating the Espionage and Hatch Acts (Hatch Act because they were trying to affect a federal election in their official capacity).

I will admit that my Hatch Act theory is getting a bit of pushback. Still, looking at the DoJ page on what is and isn’t allowed suggests very strongly that it might be applicable. And they have two different levels of employees: less restricted and more restricted. Everyone involved in this scandal is in the more restricted category because: they are SEIS (McCabe and his assistant directors, top DoJ, etc); worked for the NSD; or the FBI. What I think that you need do is reread the Strzok and Page text messages with the question in mind: were they trying to affect a federal election in or using their official capacity? Would intentionally going easy on Clinton (when interviewed by Strzok) in order to keep Trump from winning count? Leaking to the press for the same avowed purpose?

I think that most of the Hatch Act violations since its enactment have been much more peripheral and circumstantial. Those are the sorts of examples you see used to illustrate acceptable and not acceptable conduct. This is much closer to the core. Top DoJ and FBI intentionally used their official offices to tilt the scales of Justice sharply in one direction specifically and intentionally to affect the outcome of a federal election.